Living in the mind of an autistic person where we often stick to our very own routines and regimens that oftentimes are the only way for things to happen for us, not leaving the opportunity for any flexibility when circumstances may necessitate for things being different can be a challenge in some autistic people. However, as I am learning and growing, I am beginning to understand that there can be other ways to do things with the same intent occurring with things being less cumbersome in the process.
I’ll admit throughout the years it would be difficult in understanding the need to be flexible when the situation dictated itself to be out of a sense of necessity. Without a doubt it caused anxiety, which in its early days resulted in meltdowns that were at times difficult to manage especially when there was not a full scope of what was happening or what the culprit was to engage the meltdown.
Eventually, I was given more tools and skills to understand that at times being flexible was a necessity for daily living. While they may have been unorthodox at the time, they did work and allowed me to understand that as one late teacher in high school put it, “stuff happens” and we must be prepared to go through whatever may arise.
However, sometimes we have to put on our own thinking caps sometimes and be open to other ways to doing things that may also provide us with more benefits than what is happening in the present moment. It is using that flexibility and retooling what needs to be in place to use a workaround to make life more manageable for us in instances where the matters of the day may dictate maybe where one may want relief to what is happening that they must find another way or solution to solve the impeding issues that they are experiencing.
It is not to say that it is fool proof. The COVID-19 pandemic over the past several years has taught many autistic people that there needs to be often several ways of knowing that there has to be different ways to being able to manage life at a time when there were so many uncertainties, unknowns and to a degree resulted in fearmongering and regression within the autistic community. But for the most part the world came out unscathed and while there is some residue to a degree, eventually we became better people in many ways because of what the world was for those who had to live it.
Nonetheless, we learn and grow from situations that we experience in our lives. In that process, we discover that at times our quality of life improves greatly because we become more open and flexible to becoming able to adapt to situations that make us as autistic people have to think or do things in other ways than what we are used to doing in maybe one or two ways, eventually it does get better as we do what we need to do to get on our way!